Archive for the ‘cheap’ tag

I only bought the Freedom Force games – both the original and the sequel Freedom Force vs The Third Reich – fairly recently, though I annoyingly timed it just before the recent Steam £2 deal. It was a series I’d often heard lauded as a great tactical RPG to play if you like comics, but I’d never really gotten around to trying it until a few weeks ago.

I don’t totally regret the decision to buy the game, but the fact that I have to mention this up front probably hints clearly at how unsatisfied I am with the game.

What Freedom Force is, is an incredibly tongue-in-cheek game inspired mainly by 1930s comics, as oppose to the modern Marvel and DC conglomerates. It focuses on a series of characters who get exposed to an alien weapon called Energy X which accidentally rains down on the planet as part of an overly convoluted alien plan to take over Earth. The exposed humans subsequently manifest super powers, dividing fairly equally into heroes and villains. The heroes, championed by the ultra-American hero Minuteman, form into Freedom Force and go around fighting evil.

Now that Intel is done with releasing CPUs for the time being, we've got a chance to analyse the situation and see what's worth buying. For those on a budget, the Intel Core i3-530 is your best bet unless your budget is limited to £70 or so, in which case you'll have to look elsewhere. But I'm betting that if your budget is so tight that you can't go for the superior Intel Core i5-750, you haven't got fancy DDR3 memory or an LGA1156 motherboard. Enter the easy Core i3 upgrade bundle.

If you live in America then you’ll know Quantic Dream’s murderous adventure game as Indigo Prophecy, which it was re-named to in order to distance it from Fahrenheit 9/11. In Europe it’s released (in an uncut version that adds a bit of naughtiness) as Fahrenheit. That’s the version I own, so that’s what I call it. Fahrenheit; one of my favourite adventure games.

It’s not a perfect game, by any means. In fact it is downright bad in some places and the plot, which focuses on multiple characters caught up in the wake of a murder, unravels and strays hideously in the latter stages. It’s a sad result of the game, which was planned as an episodic title, being rushed to a retail release by the publisher before some chapters had been finished. It still makes sense, it just requires a bit of effort.

There are a few different characters you control in the game and the main one is a man called Lucas Kane who comes out of a trance in a New York diner to find that he’s just murdered a man. Unable to recollect the experience, Lucas flees – but not before players are given a window of interaction. The first scene of the game immediately follows the murder and lets players decide how Lucas acts. Will he hide the murder weapon? Wash the blood off his hands? Bolt out of the emergency exit and flee or return to his table, calmly pay his cheque and try to avoid suspicion?

Fahrenheit, or Indigo Prophecy if you prefer

Once Lucas leaves the murder scene the viewpoint switches to that of Tyler and Carla, the two detectives investigating the murder. You can switch between both characters and are given similar free roam as to how much evidence you collect – most of which you hid just moments before. You question witnesses and, for the bulk of the game, try to identify Lucas and track him down. When you aren’t playing as a cop though then you’re Lucas, desperately trying to discover the truth behind the murderous trance and to clear your name. Meanwhile New York descends into a permanent winter, more murders occur and the city empties as life grind to a halt.